Monday, July 14, 2014

How the Drug War Drives Child Migrants to the US Border

By Dr. Mark ThorntonMost attentive parents today rarely allow their children to go
unsupervised, particularly in public. It starts with the wireless baby
monitor for the crib
and ends with the ever-present cell phone at college graduation.
This is what makes reports from the US-Mexican border so perplexing to
most Americans. It is hard to believe that parents would send their
children, even
young children, to travel many hundreds of miles, up to 1,600 miles
without guardianship, or under the control of “mules” who guide the
children with the
hope of a safe voyage to the United States.
The journey is both harsh and dangerous. The northern regions of Central
America (i.e., Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) and Mexico are
some of the most
dangerous areas of the world. The climate can be harsh, roads and travel
conditions are mostly poor, and the children are subjected to robbers,
kidnappers,
rapists, government police and soldiers, drug cartel members, and
bandits of all sorts.
As unbelievable as it seems, Central American parents are sending their
children, or more often asking their children to join with them in the
United States,
in large numbers. In many cases the children flee on their own accord without any guardian.

A decade ago US Border Patrol agents apprehended only several hundred
unaccompanied children per year. Over the last nine months they have
caught nearly
50,000. Official estimates project the capture rate to reach 10,000 per
month by this fall. Those numbers actually hide the enormity of the
problem because
historically the problem was largely restricted to Mexican children who
could be immediately returned to Mexico. During the last couple of
years, the
majority of growth
has come from children from Central American countries
and these must be processed and turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (part of HHS).
One suggested reason for the explosion of child immigrants from Central
America is the perception and rumors that children from Central America
who cross
the border will receive a “proviso” which might suggest a permit to stay
in the US legally. However, it seems that the proviso is really just a
notice to
appear in immigration court for deportation proceedings. Whether this
gives the children more time in the US, or whether it increases the
probability of
them being allowed to stay in the US for humanitarian reasons is
unclear. In one report, only 1 of 404 children specifically mentioned
the possibility of
benefiting from US immigration reform.[1]Even if the proviso rumor was having an impact, it does not explain why
the children and their parents would risk such a dangerous journey in
the first
place.The Role of the Drug War
The underlying cause for this mass dangerous migration is the US’s war
on drugs. Central American countries have become the conduit by which
illegal drugs
move from South America across the US border. Unlike conventional media
sources, who will sometimes vaguely mention violence and instability in
Central
America as a cause, The Economist[2] quite correctly found the source of the
problem in America’s war on drugs:

Demand for cocaine in the United States (which, unlike that in Europe,
is fed through Central America), combined with the ultimately futile war
on drugs,
has led to the upsurge in violence. It is American consumers who are
financing the drug gangs and, to a large extent, American gun merchants
who are arming
them. So failing American policies help beget failed states in the
neighbourhood.

The result has been that the drug cartels have a great deal of control
over much of northern Central America. The cartels control the
governments, judges,
police forces, and even some prisons and some of the military through a
combination of bribery, threats, and outright force.
As a consequence of this control drug gangs and cartels can operate in
the open or they can operate deep within the jungle beyond the reach of
the law. In
turn, the drug cartels can act above the law and as a result they have
created a culture of violence, building on the civil wars of previous
decades.

The countries in the northern Central American region, Guatemala,
Honduras, and El Salvador, have the highest murder rate of any region in
the world. The
region’s murder rate is 7.5 times the murder rate of the North American
region.
Globally, the top murder rate in any given year since the 1990s has been
Honduras or El Salvador. In 2012, nearly 1 out of every 1,000 citizens
in Honduras
was murdered. In addition to murder, there are high rates of other types
of violence, crime, and intimidation. A very large percentage of the
entire
Salvadoran-born population has migrated, mostly to the United States.
In addition to violence, the war on drugs has been a disruptive force
for the Central American economies. After reading about the region, is
anyone likely
to make travel plans to go there, or to consider opening a business
there? Obviously, the war on drugs has been highly disruptive for job
creation,
commerce, and international investment outside the drug cartels
themselves. Therefore it would be more correct to say that it is not so
much the
attraction of opportunities in the US, but the lack of and reduction in
opportunities in Central America that are spurring emigration, and that
this is
directly linked to the war on drugs.
When you try to make sense of parents sending their children on such a
dangerous undertaking, just remember it is just another despicable
result of the
war on drugs with few solutions.
The Economist
recommends the repeal of the war on drugs and the legalization of drugs
globally as the solution. Its second best solution is for the United
States to
finance an effort to rebuild the institutions (i.e., police, courts,
prisons, etc.) and infrastructure (i.e., military, transportation, and
education
systems) in the countries of Central America:

Such schemes will not, however, solve the fundamental problem: that as
long as drugs that people want to consume are prohibited, and therefore
provided by
criminals, driving the trade out of one bloodstained area will only push
it into some other godforsaken place. But unless and until drugs are
legalised,
that is the best Central America can hope to do.

In other words, ending the war on drugs is the only solution. Mark Thornton is a senior resident fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and is the book review editor for the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.
He is the author of The Economics of Prohibition.

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The editor is a Kingdom believer, loving husband, father and business owner.

He attained a Bachelors in Finance and Economics at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

After graduating he worked in the Canadian securities industry while residing in Burlington, Ontario, and has completed the Canadian Securities Course –the Canadian investment course that qualifies graduates to sell and deal in financial products in Canada.

He currently resides in Trinidad and makes his living in the T&T Energy Sector. Contact The Editor